1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of data communications. Particular embodiments of the invention relate to systems and methods for transmitting highly secure data over public and private communication networks.
2. Related Art
The continually increasing reliance by the commercial, industrial, military and government markets on data transmission over public and private communication networks has resulted in a continually increasing requirement that such transmission be secure. Because data that is transmitted over a network can easily be intercepted, personal, confidential and classified information can easily be compromised and used improperly and illegally absent a secure means of transmitting such information.
Commercial activity over networks such as the Internet frequently involve the transmission of confidential data such as credit card numbers, social security numbers and the like. Unfortunately, transmitted confidential data can be and is frequently compromised by the interception of such data by unscrupulous network users, typically resulting in serious financial and emotional detriment to the victim.
Likewise, data transmission activities in the industrial sector also require transmissions that are secure. Industrial espionage in the United States results in losses totaling billions of dollars each year for American businesses. Industrial enterprise operates at a distinct disadvantage due to the illegal interception of proprietary data transmitted over public and private communication networks, ultimately resulting in decreased corporate profits and corporate viability.
The requirement for secure transmission of data in military and government intelligence operations cannot be overemphasized. Indeed, considering the ever-present threat of aggression by foreign military establishments against United States allies and the United States itself, along with the constant and crippling threat of terrorism nationally and abroad, the security of the United States and other countries is threatened and well at risk by the transmission of sensitive or classified information in an unsecure manner.
The requirement for secure data transmission over communication networks has prompted the development of various systems and methods that attempt to satisfy such requirements. One such attempt is to implement a private data communication link or network as shown in FIG. 1. A private data communication link or network may be implemented to securely transmit data by utilizing a dedicated line of communication 6. The dedicated line of communication may be interconnected between a first computer 2 and a second computer 4, each implementing a standard network protocol 2A, 4A to facilitate data transmission over the dedicated line of communication 6. This approach has the advantage that only those persons or organizations that have access to the dedicated communication line 6 may access data being transmitted across it. Consequently, this approach to data communications is very easy to manage. However, a dedicated line is expensive compared to public networks such as the Internet, and such expense may become cost prohibitive even for organizations with abundant resources.
Other attempts for providing secure transmission of data over communication networks implement data encryption prior to transmission over a public network. Protocols such as the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Secure HTTP (S-HTTP), an extension to the ubiquitous HTTP, have become widely used for transmitting information over the Internet. Use of the Internet for the transmission of confidential or sensitive information has given rise to the Virtual Private Network (VPN), a network constructed using the Internet to connect various nodes through which encrypted data is transmitted using IP Security (IPSec), a set of protocols supporting the secure exchange of packets at the IP layer. Although such protocols currently provide high levels of security (some supporting 128-bit encryption and higher), the rapid advances in processing technology will soon make such protocols easy to compromise. Furthermore, the aforementioned protocols do not prevent a hacker from determining that data is being transmitted and, possibly, observing how much data is being transmitted, which information may be valuable in itself. Accordingly, such protocols can provide only limited security.
Clearly, the commercial, industrial, military and government markets currently face a shortage of increasingly secure, cost-effective systems and methods of data transmission. Thus, the need for such systems and methods remains critical.